Old Family Photos

This has nothing to do with SL. Imitation is, they say, the sincerest form of flattery. One of my friends, 'She, Who Shall Not Be Named', has been posting old photos from the turn of the twentieth century. I don't have any photos that old, but this one is one of the oldest in my family's album. The date on the back is 1926.

My mother, the small child sitting in the foreground of the composition, was 4 years old. The family lived in Kocise, Czechoslovakia. My grandfather had left for America shortly after the conception of a son, my uncle Johnny. A carpenter by trade, he traveled to Ohio where he was sponsored by another relative already there. He worked hard and by 1929 saved enough money for his young wife and family to come to America. This photo was one of a series. Once a year, my grandmother would spend some of her precious money on a picture that she sent to her husband nearly half a world away so he could see how his family was growing.

I don't know who the lady on the left is My guess is that she is one of my mother's aunts. Standing in front of her is Rose, the oldest. Seated next is my mother, Mary, and then the baby, Johnny. My grandmother, who died long before I was born is holding her son. Reunited in Cleveland, my grandparents had three more children before my grandmother died around 1934.

To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heaven...

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
~Ecclesiastes 3: verses 1 and 4. Bible [KJV]

"One warning is perhaps in order---this territory we are entering can become a fantastic time-sink. Hours can slip by, people can come and go, and you'll be locked into Cyberspace. Remember to do your work!"

~Brendan P. Kehoe in his introduction to Zen and the Art of the Internet, A Beginner's Guide to the Internet. January 1992.

Mr. Kehoe's words could just as easily describe the experience many of us have in Second Life. Almost everyday I hear new residents saying how addictive the 'game' is and that they really need to cut back their hours online. I know that to be true myself. In my first few months I was on almost night and day. I would crawl off to bed exhausted around four or five a.m. only to get up at 7:00 and try to hide the fact that I was dead tired. After breakfast and coffee, LOTS of coffee, I was logging in again to explore more of the world.

I have seen horror tales of people who have destroyed their real lives as the ignored the families and closed themselves off into a room with their computer to completely immerse themselves in the virtual world. They did not play an avatar, but became the avatar and returned to real life only to eat and sleep.

Luckily for me I was on summer break and I could get away with sleeping late if I felt like it. By the time school started again I had a schedule that was much more reasonable. My first girlfriend was British and there was a five hour time difference between us. If I could login at 5:00 p.m. in the USA, I could spend a couple of hours with her before she logged off at midnight in England. If I pushed myself in the morning and got up at 4:00 I could spend and hour before I had to "wake up" for breakfast and work. We could spend more time together on weekends.

When that relationship ended I met a Dutch girl. The time difference was six hours, but it meant that we only saw each other on weekends. Now my girlfriend lives in the same time zone and so do some of my friends. My hours are more reasonable, four or five per night. Hey, I could just as well waste my time watching TV. I still spend more time online on weekends, but that is what a weekend is for.

One thing though. I have always made time for my family and real life friends. I keep real life real and know the difference between my virtual life and reality.

Can You Hear Me Now?

I like voice chat. I used to never use it, because it seems a little rude to be talking on my computer while other people (in RL) are watching TV in the same room. That was one reason. The other was that I was so used to doing text chats and IMs that it didn't really cross my mind to use voice.

That's not true now. Most of my friends use voice and you can tell a lot about people from the inflection of their voices as they talk.

Stephan, our resident scotsman, has a great accent, and although we kid him about it, we really can understand what he says. Well most of the time.

Valerie has the voice of an angel. Sweet and light, she laughs easily and can bring me out of a bad mood in an instant.

Dana is a southern belle with a voice to match. When she is laughing, I can hear the mischief she is planning in her head.

Kharma is an Australian lady I just met last night. She sounds prim and proper, but like all good Aussies, she can sling a good zinger of a comment out there to get everyone laughing.

James - I also met him last night. This Alabama country boy's voice should be bottled. It is as smooth and sharp as a good twelve year-old bourbon.

Someone else will have to provide an opinion of what my voice sounds like. I hope I sound pleasant. I only have a southern accent when I try and I think about it. But I really need to find a decent USB headset. I tend to shout at the mic built into my computer.

Who have I left out? I have a lot more friends, but not all of them use voice. Yesterday voice was working well. The lag in the sim was less that it had been in days, but you couldn't sit down. Some of us looked normal to ourselves and some people, but looked "Ruthed" to others.

We chatted about computers, clothes, skins and shapes, and how to build using flexible, sculpted prims. If that sounds boring, we also talked about how many pounds are in a stone, how many stones are in a ton, and what people look like without tops on. LOL.

fi yuo cna raed tihs...

I usually hate getting chain letters like this in my e-mail. I refuse to forward these things to "everyone in your address book." But every once in awhile I get an interesting e-mail, but I still don't forward them. I like this one though and I am dedicating this post to Crystal, the "Typo Queen" of Morris!

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it

You May Be Experiencing Lag!

Lag is a fact of Second Life for all of us. There is always a little lag in every sim. So many things affect it, the number of avatars, avatar rendering costs, the number of prims, among other factors. From time to time, the servers just slow down for reasons only known by Lord Linden himself. Jeff Foxworthy made a fortune with his "You may be a redneck" jokes. Let's look at the ways you know you are experiencing lag in Second Life.

1. If your friends ask why are you naked, you may be experiencing lag.


2. If you are in _______ (fill in the name of your favorite welcome area), you may be experiencing lag.


3. If you are always sinking into the terrain when you are in Nova Albion, you're having a normal day there, LOL.


4. If you can't stop walking through buildings, walls, and other people, you may be experiencing lag.


5. If your rezzed with a female shape and you have a male avatar, you may be experiencing lag.


6. If you rezzed without your hair, you may be experiencing lag.


7. If you can't control your movements and keep bumping into people, you may be experiencing lag, or you are a newbie.


8. If a friend leaves and your "CU L8R" text shows up in chat five minutes later, you may be experiencing lag.


9. If you can't sit on the wall at Morris, you may be experiencing lag.


10. If you can only get one shoe to rez, you may be experiencing lag.


11. If you can't teleport, you may be experiencing lag.


12. If you can't adjust your appearance without re-logging, you may be experiencing lag.


13. If your boyfriend leaves you for another girl and you don't find out for a week, you may... no wait, that's not lag. That's just life!

A Slow Day in Real Life

I have eight more days of school. Actually 7.5 days... the last day is a half day and then I can relax for almost two months of vacation, marred only by the need to do yard work and summer classes. Today is an easy day though. We are doing state mandated testing.

Ah testing. What can I say about this annual rite of passage? Not much really. I can't tell you how the test is given, what grade I was testing, who was in the room, or what was served in the cafeteria. Okay, the last part is a fib. The cafeteria menu is not secret, just disgusting.

What can I tell you about testing? Probably that it worries us teachers more than it does most of the kids. There are two adults in each room, even if there is only one student. One is the administrator and one is the proctor. That's to cover our butts. We can verify what the other did during testing and what the students did.

Because of the "No Child Left Behind" law, every year more students must pass these tests. Teachers who teach the core subjects are under the gun to have high pass rates (100% by 2014). The rest of us are expected to supplement our curriculums with English, math, science, and social studies materials to reinforce those core areas. And any discrepancy is the testing process can cause a teacher to be fired and lose his/her license.

I used to teach earth science years ago. I loved it. The units that I covered in class included geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy (my favorite). I had a curriculum to follow, what we call our Standards of Learning (SOL), but I was free to design my course around those goals. I loved to teach my meteorology unit at the beginning of the winter months when the students were interested in predicting when the next snow day was coming. I usually started the year with geology, but I loved to bring up current events of earthquakes or volcanos anytime of the year. If NASA was launching a space probe or a shuttle mission, you better believe that was the topic of the day in my class room.

But that all changed. Accountability in the class room lead to tighter standards. I could no longer be flexible in my teaching and my assessment of student progress. Field trips were limited to only those that could be justified under the SOL. A strict curriculum guide was written in every school outlining instruction down to the week and sometimes day. Tests and quizzes needed to conform to the style used in the state tests. In other words, we teachers were expected to become robots who taught to the test. The all important, unforgiving, inflexible test.

Now before you begin to think I am too bitter, cynical, and morose, there still is a lot of fun and creativity in teaching. We just have to work harder to pull it all together and educate our students as well as teach to the test. The younger teachers, God bless them, are better at that than I am (old dogs... new tricks). I am impressed with their energy and creativity. Was I that energetic once long ago?

Today was an easy day for me. The students were quiet after testing and laid their heads on their desks and slept. A few read their books (Twilight is very popular this year with the little girls). During the afternoon I only had four students in class while others were testing. When I finish this post in a minute, I'll load it and go online. Maybe my girlfriend will be there. I've missed her. Maybe one of my other friends will have time to talk. Maybe the lag will not be so bad tonight. LAG! UGH! But that is another story.

The only way to have a friend...

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I might be too close to this topic to write about it impartially. How do we make friends online? How do people become close, really close? And no, I am not talking about pixel sex here. How do we open up and share details of our lives with people who are seemingly totally unknown to us? Why, why would I tell you my dark secrets, secrets I keep hidden from my family and my therapist?

A friend is one who knows us,
but loves us anyway.
~Fr. Jerome Cummings

Like I said, this is a hard topic. When we enter an online world like Second Life, we come here for various reasons - to play games, explore our fantasies, or to socialize and learn about other cultures. No matter why you are here, you are going to make friends. It's inevitable. You are in a world with people who have similar interests, and you can't help but talk and interact with them. Second Life is designed for friendship. We can instantly know when a friend is online. We can talk privately to them. With their permission we can even know their location in-world.

How do we make friends? That is the easy part. Just like real life you meet someone. You talk to him or her. Either you are impressed with the person's wit and agree with his or her opinions or you don't. Some people make friends quickly... and drop friends quickly. Others take their time. A friendship is not just part of the game to all of us. We take it seriously. We want and need true friendship.

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just
to share your riches but to reveal to him his own."
~ Benjamin Disraeli

I am in the first group, sort of. When I listen to someone talk, what they say and how they say it, I make a pretty quick decision about whether or not I want them for a friend. But sometimes it still takes time, because the other person might be a slow-to-friendship person. Some of my best friends are of that kind of person. I hung around them for months, talking, joking, discussing everything from the weather around the world to favorite music and movies. In some cases I finally made the move to ask for official SL friendship. Other times my friend has offered it to me.

In a virtual world our privacy is important to everyone. I might be a three-toed sloth online with a disturbing fetish for leather boots. If I were, I would be unhappy to be outed on LickMyBootsYou3-toedSloth.com with my real name and other personal info. Second Life would not be happy either. If clients cannot maintain a reasonable level of anonymity then people will not be willing to spend time and money there. Yet as we make friends in-world we open up to each other just like in real life because friendship, true friendship is always based on trust.

"If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship,
we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own."
~ Charlotte Bronte

Here is where a conversation with a friend comes in. We were talking the other night. Let me say first that we are not intimate. I feel like we are brother and sister. I care for her deeply. When she laughs, I laugh. When she cries, her tears pierce my heart. We were talking about very personal things in our individual real lives. She knows some secrets of mine. I know some of hers. We trust each other with those secrets. That night as she virtually cried on my shoulder we asked each other why we could tell each other things that we can't even tell our real life friends.

I have thought about her question for days. Trust is the first answer to come mind. I know I trust her and obviously she trusts me. But why trust a 'friend' you have not met face-to-face? Part of it may have to do with the anonymity of an online relationship. My friend and I both understand it is highly unlikely that we will ever meet in real life. The distance that separates us also insulates us from each other.

"A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good
egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked."
~ Bernard Meltzer

The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are lots of examples of friendships that have developed over time where the people may have never met face-to-face. People throughout the years, yes even before the Internet, have been pen-pals, met and talked on the same ham or CB frequencies, or talked for long hours of the night on the telephone.

When you are listening to someone this way, through the text that they have typed on the screen, listened carefully to their spoken words and phrases, even taking note of the pauses before they answer a question, we learn to read someone and gain insight into their personality. I knew a lot about my friend, how she felt about different subjects, people, and life, by paying close attention to everything she said while I was around her, long before we became official friends.

Many people will walk in and out of your life,
but only true friends
will leave footprints in your heart.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

Like I said in the beginning of this post, I am probably too close to this to write about it effectively. As I write this I keep thinking of my friend. A smile passes over my lips as I think that shortly she will be reading these words and how I can't wait to hear her comments on them.